Rachel Bowlby

Rachel Bowlby is the author, among other books, of Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, Shopping with Freud, and Just Looking: Consumer Culture
in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. Her work on the history of shopping has moved between the department stores of the nineteenth century (Just Looking), which offered middle-class women a space in the city that was both safe and glamorous, and the supermarkets
of the twentieth century (Carried Away), thought of as placeless
and faceless and readily linked to an idea of suburban sameness.
Thinking about the different prospects of city walking and city
curiosity, she has also worked on the figure of the flâneur—the
walker in the streets—and his unsymmetrical female counterparts, the flâneuse and the passante, the female passer-by, momentarily glimpsed (see ‘Women, Walking and Writing’, in Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis).
An essay on commuting appears in Restless Cities, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (2010).

Books

Carried Away: The Invention
of Modern Shopping. London: Faber and Faber, November 2000 and
New York: Columbia UP, 2001. 281 pp. (On the history of self-service and
supermarkets in relation to suburbs, high streets, and changing conceptions of
women shoppers.)

Still Crazy After All These
Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Reprinted 1998. x + 185pp. (Includes two chapters on women and the
city.)

Just
Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. London and New York:
Methuen, 1985. xii + 187pp. Rpt.
2010 (London: Routledge). (On the rise of the city department store and
leisured shopping for women.)

Edited
Book

Editor
with Introduction: Virginia Woolf, The
Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993). (Includes all Woolf’s significant essays on the city and
modernity.)

'p/s', on the figure of the passante,
in Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (eds), The
Woman in Question: An m/f Anthology
(London: Verso and Boston: MIT P, 1990), pp. 358-76.

'Modes of Modern Shopping: Mallarmé at
the Bon Marché', in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds), The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in
Literature and the History of Sexuality
(London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 185‑205.